Dario Franchitti gets wired to find out the exact forces he withstands and exerts while in the cockpit of a race car and proves once and for all that IndyCar drivers are truly athletes.

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The old yarn about whether racecar drivers should be considered as elite athletes has, I hope, been put to rest.

If the status of "athlete" is afforded to those who get paid to swim or pedal bicycles, surely it's deserved in a sport that involves the use of every major extremity, lightning-fast reflexes, unparalleled levels of hand/eye coordination and depth perception, strategical thinking and included the ever-present risk of injury and death.

Despite being secure in his place on the athletic landscape, that didn't stop three-time Indy 500 winner and four-time IZOD IndyCar Series champion Dario Franchitti from inquiring about the exact forces he withstands and exerts in the cockpit.

Specifically, the Scot wondered what kind of workout was required to drive a 1585-pound Indy car at the most recent race in Mid-Ohio.

"You hear that talk about whether drivers are really athletes, and I get asked that from time to time, so I wanted to have some concrete numbers to go off of," the wiry, 5′ 9″ Franchitti told RoadandTrack.com. "And I'd always been curious myself, so now I can tell people exactly what we're dealing with inside the car."

Run in sweltering humidity and temperatures over 90 degrees, Franchitti asked his engineers at the Target Chip Ganassi Racing team to use their on-board data acquisition system and the dozens of sensors installed through his Honda-powered Dallara DW12 chassis to quantify the stresses and strains he endured around the 2.2-mile, 13-turn road course.

Try Braking

To start, the findings zeroed in braking and steering, the two biggest functions that involve sustained effort over the course of a race. Franchitti and the other IndyCar drivers had three hard braking zones to deal with on every lap, and used the brake pedal to a lesser degree in three additional corners.

Focusing on the three major braking efforts, Franchitti generated 1375 PSI of line pressure at his peak under threshold braking, and with the motion ratio of his brake pedal factored in, that equates to 135 pounds of force applied by his right foot in each instance.

For those who've gone to the gym and used the leg press, it's the equivalent of putting three 45-pound plates on the sled and using the ball of your right foot—the contact point between a driver and the brake pedal–to do the lifting. But that doesn't tell the full tale.

Those three major braking events at Mid-Ohio last a second or more, so hold each repetition up for a few seconds. And here's the other part to consider: The Mid-Ohio race lasted an hour and 39 minutes and had no caution periods. Other than two quick pit stops for Franchitti, he had no time to rest.

With an 85-lap race, lap times taking just over 60 seconds apiece and three hard braking efforts per lap, that equates to approximately one single-leg 135-pound exertion every 18 seconds—and holding the weight up momentarily between reps–for an hour and 39 minutes straight.

Altogether, that's 255 reps generated in 18-second increments while watching the remake of "Total Recall" from start to finish (on second thought, watching that flick might actually be the harder task to accomplish).

Once you're done with the leg exercises, you'll find that steering an Indy car around a physical track like Mid-Ohio is even more grueling.

Try Steering

Think of any movie where a ship or a submarine is taking on water and one of the crew members has to open a hatch to get out or seal a flooded compartment. While Hollywood tends to make the turning of the hatch wheel an only-Superman-has-the-strength-to-accomplish-this affair, doing the same with an Indy car wheel for the aforementioned hour and 39 minutes does require extraordinary strength and fortitude.

The forearm- and core-busting twisting effort can be traced to a few different factors, including the Dallara's front suspension geometry, Firestone's gummy 10-inch-wide slicks, a lack of power steering and enough downforce to grind the bottom of the car into the track surface.

To replicate the steering forces, Franchitti says it involves a bit more than one might expect.

"It's not really holding the weight out, but lifting that and rotating weight with forces pushing back on your lead hand," he remarked. "In Turn 1, you have to pull down with the left and push up with the right to overcome 35 pounds of force, then do the opposite for the right-hander in Turn 2, and so on. Imagine a string tied to your hand where you have to pull that 35 pounds up or down constantly. There's tremendous kick-back through the steering wheel on the new Indy car, and there's no power steering, so every movement of the wheel requires a lot of energy."

With little time to rest between Mid-Ohio's corners, the steering effort is akin to exerting 35 pounds of twisting force, putting the weight down on the straights, picking it up again and repeating that process 13 times a lap.

That multiplies out to 1,105 burning reps during the race, with crunches included due to the torqueing motion drivers use from their core to assist their arms.

Using Mid-Ohio's 150 mph scary-fast Turn 1 to quantify the loads Franchitti and others experience, his Dallara DW12 produces 2800 pounds of downforce through the corner—approximately nine Shaquille O'Neals sitting on the car.

And with his weight (155 pounds), driver equalization ballast (30 pounds to get Franchitti up to the 185-pound standard), the Dallara's curb weight (1585 pounds) and a full tank of E85 ethanol (124 pounds), that's 4,694 pounds to be dealt with via the steering wheel.

Next time you feeling like emulating and IndyCar driver, borrow a Honda Ridgeline pickup truck, head to Mid-Ohio, disconnect the power steering and try navigating Turn 1 at 150 mph to see if you have what it takes to steer an Indy car.

Frankly, the 1,105 reps with a 35-pound weight might be a more attainable goal.

"Remember, you can't breathe above a certain number of G forces, so you get into the corner and brace yourself like a fighter pilot does when he's making a hard turn," he said before describing an oxygen-deprived lap in detail.

"At Mid-Ohio, you're at Turn 1, hold your breath, get through the corner, breathe, breathe, breathe on the straight, brace yourself for Turn 2, hold your breath through the corner, accelerate out of the corner and breathe, breathe, breathe, then you brake, brace yourself, hold your breath in [Turn] 3, at Turn 4 you're holding your breath again over the hill, down the hill to Turn 5 you take one breath then hold it, turn, breathe again over the crest, hold your breath, turn into 9, still holding that breath over the hill, breathe, breathe, breathe on the way to Turn 11, brace yourself, hold your breath, turn...get through [Turn] 12, breathe, turn, hold through Turn 13 and then you do it all over again. It's kind of mental, really..."

Franchitti cited the general state of exhaustion among the drivers after the no-holds-barred qualifying session at Mid-Ohio as the perfect visual depiction of the environment they work in.

"Did you see the lot of us after qualifying?" he said with a laugh. "We were gutted. Just staring into space or whatever. No one had anything left to give. Everyone was empty. I'm not complaining–I loved every minute of it, but it takes everything you have just to produce those kinds of lap times. I bet we looked like zombies afterwards..."

Combine the single-leg braking efforts each lap, combine it with the truck-minus-power-steering arm exercises while holding your breath, and the portrait of what it takes to perform as an elite Indy car driver starts to take shape.

The final element requires prodigious neck strength.

With the Dallara DW12 peaking at 4.5 lateral Gs while cornering, a driver's head—with ear plugs, a balaclava and helmet—becomes a 64-pound pendulum. Despite ample padding on both sides of the protective helmet surround piece in the cockpit, turning left though Turn 1—and the rest of Mid-Ohio's corners—involves a major fight to keep one's head in a vertical position.

Turn left, and the 64-pound pendulum wants to flop over to the right, and vice versa. But with a critical need to keep eyes fixed on the road ahead and to process all of the data and sensations coming through the chassis, drivers like Franchitti develop neck muscles that a wrestler would envy.

"I tailor my training to the muscles that I use most; I'm sure it's the same way for any athlete," Franchitti explained. "I do a lot of core training—it obviously ties everything together with what we do with our arms and legs in a race. And your head and neck is subjected to so much force, there's some specialized training we do to strengthen those muscles.

"The last thing you can afford to have happen is to wear your neck out halfway through a race. If you can't hold your head up, and it's happened to all of us at one time or another, it's game over. You start going backwards right away."

You can attribute the insane physical requirements placed on an Indy car driver to many things, but Franchitti sees downforce as the opponent that he constantly trains to overcome.

"The difficulty here is because of the crazy downforce these things produce," he said. "A car with zero downforce wouldn't be anything like this tough to drive. But the more downforce you produce, the crazier speeds you can carry, the bigger the fitness problem...it's all part of the fun."